4. Basic Assumptions of the Theory of Society and Programmatic Outlook - Also a History of Philosophy - Joshua Dunigan

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4. Basic Assumptions of the Theory of Society and Programmatic Outlook

Habermas outlines many definitional terms here in an unstructured way. I will avoid most of this jargon, though it is useful.

Habermas defines society as a

systemically stabilized networks of action and communication of socially integrated groups that, embedded in lifeworld contexts, simultaneously manage conflict and are able to cooperate.
More jargon follows, defining how these parts relate to each other: culturally stored knowledge, embodied competencies, and adaptation processes. This is appropriate for sociology, which is part of Habermas's project.

Vital to Habermas's genealogy is that society has learning processes. These are either social-cognitive or moral. They are social-cognitive when learning processes, conflict resolution, and cooperation extend beyond one's current social collective to the 'stranger' or 'other'. They are moral when conflicts with those outside the social collective are resolved through non-violent means.

Society does not just reproduce itself and its life. This idea goes back to Aristotle, who argued that society is not just mere "metabolic" reproduction, but reproduces the "good life" of the community. Habermas, following Marx, argues that society also has a "surplus of social integration" that differs from the preservation of the social system.

Only crisis symptoms of different kinds indicate when the conditions for the adequate social integration of a particular society are no longer fulfilled—crises that can also be triggered by malfunctions, for example, of the economic or healthcare system (through famines or epidemics), but which are themselves different from deficiencies of system integration.
This goes back to the chapter on crisis scenarios, particularly my excursions on Rene Girard's theory of modernity and crisis. Habermas goes exactly this route because he follows up with pointing out just this exactly, what Habermas calls "the sacred complex". If you recall, Girard points out the ambivalence of the sacred and also the ambivalence of crises, that a plague had a dual meaning of crisis of the system but also a crisis of social integration, and the sacred was the societal tool for addressing the crisis of social integration.

Habermas writes of the fundamental problem that we may recognize as similar to the state of nature, but arguably goes back before this to the existential state of nature, the survival of human groups as such.

To the extent that the reproduction of their lives becomes dependent on cooperation with others, individuals must come to terms with the fact that their self-preservation is intrinsically interwoven with the fate of the collective.
Human societies would live or die as a group. This was how humans were able to survive and we see it with other animal species. Humans were able to do this extremely well, such as hunting animals much larger than ourselves, and sometimes to extinction.

However, this creates a tension, or exposes an existing one, between the "egocentricity of individual self-assertion" and the "normative demands on the individual to submit to communal imperatives." Habermas writes:

In this sense, social inclusion is a permanent problem that must be continually resolved and becomes manifest as such only in the face of specific challenges—for example when famines or epidemics throw the cohesion of a tribal society into disarray, or when, nowadays, global economic competition from lower-wage emerging countries threatens the level of prosperity, and thus also the social cohesion, of the more developed societies. In early societies, ritual, or more generally, the sacred complex represented a deep-seated anthropological mechanism that could provide a kind of surety in the event of such crises, which can lead to disintegration and anomie, violence and rebellion. It comprises practices of dealing with power of salvation and misfortune, on the one hand, and mythical worldviews on the other (whereby the mythical narratives may have been the result of a retrospective interpretation of rites that were originally performed intuitively and, in the meantime, had become inscrutable).
I do not want to repeat too much Girard here, especially since there will be more novel points to discuss between Habermas and Girard's stories. However, it is clear that Habermas and Girard are extremely close, while Habermas might reject Girard's origin of the sacred. Both agree that the sacred was a holistic mechanism, one that was alive, and something that needed to be re-worked with each new crisis due to the possibility of social disintegration. A mythical worldview may have worked at the time, indeed, it may have been 'rational' and 'reasonable', but over time, Habermas wants us to think, mythical worldviews proved inadequate to internal or external crises and had to evolve or revolutionize themselves.

Worldviews also adapt through disruption "by an increase in knowledge of the world", Habermas says. This minor point is worth expanding on. For centuries if not millennia, knowledge progresses rather slowly. You might not see any sort of disruption in society through knowledge for generations. Girard also writes on disruption or innovation in a paper titled "Innovation and Repetition".

Worldviews have a stabilizing function for society that is circular: society stabilizes, a worldview is created in interpretation of that initial stabilization, and then the worldview aids stabilization. The worldview's function is to create a stable system. Girard writes that these are systems with stable ways of "desiring" or "imitating". When someone innovates in these earlier societies, it is seen as a destabilizing force and thus bad. Girard notes how for essentially all of pre-modern times, Christian or pagan, innovation was seen as destabilizing and destructive.

But as Habermas notes, "Myths stabilize society and are at the same time destabilizing gateways for dissonant empirical knowledge." This appears in Hobbes, one of those Girard cites as against innovation. For Girard, the state of nature is resolved and stabilized in the political commonwealth. In the state of nature, history, time, culture, etc. are not possible because civilization cannot get off the ground. One can see how a society is stunted through perpetual conflict and civil war. However, the stabilization of the Leviathan creates the possibility for the advancement of knowledge and internal disruption.

Habermas fundamentally thinks that religious worldviews, as orthodox and stabilizing, cannot defend themselves from this "exposed flank". Philosophy avoids this due to its self-aware effort to "achieve an understanding of the self and the world". Philosophy has a goal not tied to stabilization or stability, and "disruption" is part of the project. This is seen most evidently in Hegel, who at times seems impossible to get away from because of the way 'error' and 'disruption' are incorporated into his project. This is one reason that prompted the famous Foucault quote.

Truly to escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the extent to which Hegel, insidiously perhaps, is close to us; it implies a knowledge, in that which permits us to think against Hegel, of that which remains Hegelian. We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us.
Arguably, Christianity incorporates this into its worldview and philosophy, which might speak to its enduring presence and influence in the Western story. I will see over the course of the book what Habermas thinks of Christianity.

Outline of the argument

After this, Habermas again sets out to outline the rest of the project in more detail. I don't want to go into detail here because I would be duplicating myself from the beginning, and we will get into it in more detail starting in the next chapter when the genealogy begins.

Habermas takes this as another way to dive deeper into how he thinks philosophy evolved out of the discourse on faith and knowledge and how it evolved with social and historical change. Worldviews of societies constantly adapted to crises and disruption through learning processes. Sometimes it was the world, but sometimes it was "philosophy" that was the motor of change. This story is largely about the latter. It is about how philosophy developed, evolved, and landed in the shape of postmetaphysical thinking as we know it. This story takes us from the Axial age worldviews, including Homer, the Aeneid, but also Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Buddhism. We then get to the turning point from Plotinus to Augustine, then the era of the Church with figures like Aquinas, Luther, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, and then to the age of early modernity with figures like Hobbes, Descartes, and Machiavelli.

As a final note, Habermas did explicitly cite Sellars and Brandom when discussing his philosophy, especially the space of reasons. I knew Habermas's language earlier was similar to Brandom. I wrote a similar, though much quicker and less easy to read digest of my notes from when I read Brandom's A Spirit of Trust in 2021.